They knocked up an inn-keeper in King's Lynn, and the two men ate and drank. Deane himself drank a long whiskey and soda, and lit a cigar. Then they rushed onward into the darkness, already lightening a little in the east. Dawn was breaking as they climbed their last hill and ran down toward the marshlands. A red light loomed over the gray, sullen sea. The marshes themselves seemed heavy and undistinguishable--patches of land and dark creeks of salt-water running into one another. Out in the bay the foam-topped breakers came rolling sullenly in. When at last they turned through the gate, and went slowly up the rough road--marked out with white stakes--which led up to the tower, the dawn had actually come, the night was a thing of the past, although its shadow seemed to hang low over the gray land. The sea had been lately over the rough road, and progress was difficult. At last, though, they reached the little bank of shingle on which the tower was built, and Deane, with a little sigh of relief, stepped wearily down. While his servant unlocked the front door and busied himself arranging a bed and lighting a fire, Deane walked down to the edge of the sea, whose white-topped waves were dragging back the shingle as they fell and broke, with a dull, grinding noise. Never, it seemed to him, had the beauty of loneliness appealed to him more strongly than at this hour of dawn. The birds were silent, the wind had fallen, there was no sound whatever from the sleeping land. Only the eternal breaking of the waves continued--a sound which was more like the background for stillness, grim and mysterious, inevitable as existence itself. Far away now seemed that crowded court, with its eager faces, its rapt issues,--far away seemed the importance of wealth, the great question whether he should remain amongst the millionaires--the world buyers, or take his place amongst the poor men of the earth. What did it matter, after all, this kingship of the cities, with their lack of perspective, their crowded hours, their strange, artificial atmosphere? The value of these things was, grotesque, for a moment,--distorted. He had been wise to come here, he told himself, as a breath of the morning wind stole, faint and fresh, across the salt sea. Perhaps he would be wiser still if he defied fortune and stayed here always. His servant summoned him, and he went reluctantly indoors. He ate some biscuits and drank some milk. Then, as the real dawn broke over the sea, a fiery red, and with many suggestions of troubled weather in its angry glow, he opened the window and threw himself upon the little iron bedstead with its lavender-scented sheets. CHAPTER XXI ALL AS IT SHOULD BE